Theology for the Masses

Last Friday, we looked at the physical shrine of Hagia Thekla and what it said about gender roles in early Christianity.  Today, I wanna look at the actions and attitudes of the real people who lived and traveled there.  We will see that the devotees that worshiped, vistied, and lived at Hagia Thekla were from a variety of diverse backgrounds that cut across societal, gender, and geographical lines.  This attests to Thecla’s pull in the early Christian period. 

The primary sources for getting a glimpse at the patronage of Hagia Thekla are the later texts surrounding the tradition. Mining these sources will help identify those people consuming the tradition and illuminate its appeal. The author of Life and Miracles collected miracle accounts from the area that most likely date from 370-420 CE. [1]   As we will see, the text paints a site that is largely patronized by women and betrays a tension with patriarchal encroachment. The book “presents a picture of pilgrimage practice and martyr cult suffused with the presence and activity of women.” [2]   Fifteen of the miracle stories in Miracles involve women and complains in chapter 44 about not being able to collect all of the accounts. There are four classes of devotees described by these texts: wandering itinerants, pilgrims, monastics, and married devotees. Each of these types is attested to in the Diary of Life and Life and Miracles.

Sign pointing the way to the Convent of Saint Thecla in modern day Maalula

Itinerant wandering was a relatively common practice in early Christianity. [3]   Self-imposed exile and homelessness by Christians “provided a way of separating from the world by leaving home and stability, and embarking on a life of travel.”  [4]   Miracles 34 describes itinerants journeying to the shrine that are attacked by local bandits and saved by Thecla. These women were virgins [5] that lived out ascetic virtues. Normally itinerant wanderers would have no particular destination in mind for their wanderings, yet Miracles 34 suggest that this wanderer was based at the shrine when Thecla asks why the men have driven this wanderer away from Thecla’s house. If this is the case, this it is possible that a section of the devotees based at the shrine practiced ascetic wandering. This would have been a fruitful method of disseminating the Theclan tradition and oral stories. [6]    It also emulates the model Thecla herself provides as both a wanderer and a monastic. [7]

In contrast to the wanderers based at the shrine, there was also an international pilgrimage centered on the shrine. Pilgrimage was a specialized form monasticism based on ascetic travel and wandering. [8]   We should be wary of importing the medieval stereotype of pilgrimage based on Chaucer. [9]   Instead, we should think of “pilgrimage and the pilgrim in the classical philosophical sense of a ‘foreigner… who want[s] to go home.” [10]   Dietz claims that pilgrimage was largely the domain of women. [11] Dietz suggests that:

It was women, rather than [men], travelers who most often set up monasteries and xenodocia. The patterns of late antique Christian travel defy out assumptions about social and gender roles. Itinerant spirituality held a special appeal to women, perhaps the relatively marginal role of women in late antique society made them ideally suited to its pursuit. [12]

The Convent of Saint Thecla in modern day Maalula, next to the supposed cave mentioned in the extended edition of the Acts of Thecla

Egeria was considered to be the quintessential pilgrim in late antique Christianity. [13] For her, it was the journey itself not the places visited that defined the pilgrimage. [14]   However, after this, “perhaps the most important part of [traveling] was meeting holy people.” [15]   Their stories were collected and passed along; as a matter of fact, it was the continuity of holy people at a site that made the site holy, not the ground itself. Pilgrimage to the site was regular to the degree that it had become routinized by the time Egeria was traveling in the late fourth century. She records four-step liturgy consisting of an arrival prayer, a reading of the entire Acts of Thecla, prayer and the Eucharist, and departure. [16]   In addition to a ritualized liturgy, military protection, and increasingly regular routes to the shrine contribute to the routinization of pilgrimage to the shrine. [17]

View from inside of the cave at Hagia Thekla.

As noted above, Hagia Thekla had a substantial monastic community. Both Egeria and the Writer of Life and Miracles attest to this community. Egeria describes the possible community’s leader as a deaconess named Marthana. [18]   She is the only person named by Egeria. However, the Life and Miracles refer to male guardians on more than one occasion. Therefore it is uncertain if she lead the entire monastic community or only the female devotees. These cells consisted of both men and women; [19] the females were referred to as aputactitae, or virgins. [20]   These people served the shrine, offering hospitality to any travelers. As mentioned above, they might also have employed ascetic wandering as part of their monastic life.

In addition to these virgins, there were the local and regional married devotees of the Theclan shrine. The Miracles attest to several married women that appealed to Thecla and were granted their prayers. Once such instance is in Miracles 14 where a married woman appeals to Thecla for the religious faith of her husband Hypsistios. She does not live at the shrine nor at the nearby city of Seleucia; she traveled at least 80 kilometers. Thecla convinces Hypsistios to join the Christian community after first strickening him with an illness and then appearing to him as a chambermaid, the result of which is his confession of a Trinitarian formula of belief. Another story, Miracles 42, tells of a woman who leaves her husband and joins the theater. Losing her beauty as a result of this, she travels to Hagia Thekla and petitions her. Thecla appears to her and restores her beauty and her husband. These stories demonstrate that the Thecla tradition as it had developed in the fifth century was welcoming to married women and “despite their emphasis on ascetic values (e.g. women’s flight from family) the Miracles do not portray a clientele restricted to and elite, semi-eremitical caste of virgins or a privileged stream of visiting nuns.” [21] One did not have to separate from their marriage nor abstain from sexual relations with their spouse in order to participate within the tradition.

Another view inside the modern day remains of Hagia Thecla

Lastly, there was a male contingent at the shrine. This group is attested to in the Miracles and in Egeria’s diary account. In the fourth century there were living quarters of an indeterminate number and percentage at the shrine before it was moved. [22] Their influence in the cult is uncertain. On the one hand, it is the women that feature prominently in the narratives; on the other hand, it is possible to detect patriarchalizing patterns within the narratives. For instance, in Life “inventions of female vulgarity” is used to describe the jewelry that Thecla uses to bribe Paul’s jailers. [23] This evaluation is absent from the earlier traditions. [24]   There are multiple accounts of the male guardians accompanying traveling women in Miracles. Other sections of Miracles describe the female in terms of reduced masculinity. For the writer of Life and Miracles the way for females to achieve true piety was to move into the realm of men. We see this in the words of the governor who witnessed Thecla’s trail of beasts comments on her “forceful and manly qualities.”  [25]   It is most likely that these are not the overwhelming views and attitudes of the cult of Thecla, given the predominance of women at the shrine, but are the result of the attitudes of the male writer who paraphrased the Acts of Thecla and collected the oral accounts of the women at the shrine. Finally, these traces of patriarchal undercurrents demonstrate that Hagia Thekla cult did not develop independently from men.

Above we have seen that the devotees of Hagia Thekla and consequently the Thecla tradition were from a varied background; there were monastics, wanderers, pilgrims, virgins, married women, and men devotees. The Hagia Theckla shrine gave devotees a way for female Christians to express their religious views. The presence and footprint of males on the site demonstrates that the site and the cult centered on it did not privilege males over females. However, the larger feminine footprint was due to the fact that this was one of the few sites which allowed female expression. Given this varied clientele, let us know explore the roots of the Thecla tradition to see out of what this robust devotion originated.

Wednesday, we will be traveling farther back in time and looking at the text itself and looking at how it constructed and commented on gender roles.

1. Ibid., 41. [↩]
2. Ibid., 49. [↩]
3. See chapter 10 of Maribel Dietz, "Itinerant Spirituality and the Late Antique Origins of Christian Pilgrimage," in Travel, Communication, and Geography in Late Antiquity: Sacred and Profane, ed. Linda Ellis (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 2004). [↩]
4. Ibid., 126. [↩]
5. Life and Miracles 34 [↩]
6. Dietz, "Itinerant Spirituality and the Late Antique Origins of Christian Pilgrimage," 133. [↩]
7. Acts of Thecla, Chapter 23 and 40, Acts of Thecla-Seleucia Chapters 43 [↩]
8. Dietz, "Itinerant Spirituality and the Late Antique Origins of Christian Pilgrimage," 125. [↩]
9. Linda Ellis, "Reconsidering Late Antique Pilgrimage," in Travel, Communication, and Geography in Late Antiquity: Sacred and Profane, ed. Linda Ellis (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 2004), 111. [↩]
10. Ibid. [↩]
11. Dietz, "Itinerant Spirituality and the Late Antique Origins of Christian Pilgrimage," 126. [↩]
12. Ibid., 133. [↩]
13. Ibid., 126. [↩]
14. Ibid., 129. [↩]
15. Ibid., 129. [↩]
16. Egeria, "Diary of a Pilgrimage," in Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook, ed. Ross Shepard Kraemer (Oxford University PressUS, 2004), 236. lines 20-25. Egeria also records a similar process at other places on her journey. [↩]
17. For a detailed argument for the ritualization of the pilgrimage of Hagia Thekla, see Davis, The Cult of St. Thecla: An Introduction to Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity, 65-72.. [↩]
18. Egeria, "Diary of a Pilgrimage," 237. Chapter 23, Line 11. [↩]
19. Ibid. Chapter 23, Line 24. [↩]
20. Ibid. Chapter 23, Line 13. [↩]
21. Davis, The Cult of St. Thecla: An Introduction to Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity, 61. [↩]
22. "The Acts of Thecla," in Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook, ed. Ross Shepard Kraemer (Oxford University PressUS, 2004), 237. Chapter 23, Line 23 and 24. [↩]
23. Life 8. [↩]
24. "The Acts of Thecla," 301. Chapter 18. [↩]
25. Life 23 [↩]